Thanks Alix! Actually, I was able to find that on google too, so I guess I posted too hastily. I'm going to test it tommorrow and I'll see how it goes. I guess it should work ok.

My cake has evolved a little since before. I've decided to go with a uniform frosting (vanilla buttercream) but the inside will still be half chocolate, half vanilla pastry creams. I have also decided on a raspberry syrup made from heated raspberry preserves.

I made a scaled model on cardboard, and I realized there's no room for bilingual "happy birthday/bonne fete" so I'm going to just have "happy birthday".

After making the model, I realize that this is going to be one HUGE cake. A three layer 18/13" cake... Even for 36 people, there should be plenty of extra for second helpings!

Ok. I just finished baking the cake with the heating core. The cake came out more or less perfectly, but the cut out part of the cake (taken from the heating core) does not fit in as seamlessly as I had hoped. The hole in the cake is just GLARING. The gap between the cut out and the cake (made by the width of the heating core itself) is just obvious. It looks god awful! More to the point, the gap is large enough that if I lifted the cake, I'd risk the cut out piece just falling out the middle!

I'm not sure this is necessarily really going to affect the cake in the end, since I doubt it will be noticeable once the cake has been sliced/filled and frosted, but this is still very annoying.

And unless I am missing something, this would seem to be an unavoidable cost of using the heating core.

How about investing (or hiring) one of those fancy cake stands that let you display a number of tiers of cakes, but not directly on top of one another? That would allow you to make a variety of cakes and icings but grouped together in a 'themed' way?

First of all, even though you've progressed past this already, for future use you might want to note that on the Wilton site (www.wilton.com of course) you can find the standard cake-cutting diagrams for all sizes and shapes of cakes you might ever want to make. (The only thing you'll need to figure out for yourself is the difference in size of the final slice if you veer away from a standard height.) BTW, while there are any number of things that are cheesy on the Wilton site, overall their guidelines are sound and their tools good quality (their pans are truly excellent).

As for the heating core -- sorry you had such a negative first experience. Your comments puzzle me since I have used my core on several large cakes and found it very satisfactory. Can you tell me: is yours a thin aluminum affair, looking very much like a road cone? Is it a Wilton product?

Mine is as I describe above and it makes a very neat little cake "plug" which pops back into the cake nicely, albeit slightly smaller than the surrounding hole. Is there any possibility that your cake shrunk away from the core for some reason? That the gap is large enough that the plug would just fall out the bottom makes zero sense to me ... can you explain?

As for the heating core -- sorry you had such a negative first experience. Your comments puzzle me since I have used my core on several large cakes and found it very satisfactory. Can you tell me: is yours a thin aluminum affair, looking very much like a road cone? Is it a Wilton product?

It's probably Wilton, but I don't recall the manufacturer. It appears exactly as the google images show.

Quote:

Mine is as I describe above and it makes a very neat little cake "plug" which pops back into the cake nicely, albeit slightly smaller than the surrounding hole. Is there any possibility that your cake shrunk away from the core for some reason? That the gap is large enough that the plug would just fall out the bottom makes zero sense to me ... can you explain?

In the end, the cake was 100% useable. There was no functional problem. It's just ugly. I will be using it for my cake.